Over the past decade, the concept of fascism has returned with a vengeance in attempts to understand the planetary shift to the far-right. As several commentators have rightly indicated, the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s is considerably different from the fascism that appears to be shaping the politics of the contemporary global order. The latter has been understood along two distinct axes. The first holds that it is a species of authoritarian populism in which movements purporting to embody or personify the will of the “people” are driven to transgress every moral, epistemic and aesthetic limit in manifesting sovereign power. The second mainatins that contemporary fascism is a form of what has been referred to as “technofascism,” which has been given politico-philosophical shape by “Dark Enlightenment” thinkers such as Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin who articulate starkly anti-democratic positions. While the first form could be said to undermine liberal democracy from within by pushing it in an increasingly “illiberal” direction, the second form brazenly attacks the very idea of democracy from without, by explicitly stating its incompatibility with capitalist social relations.  In this lecture, I will pose the question as to which explanation best grasps the contemporary authoritarian turn and how can it be opposed. 

The publication of Reading Capital [Lire le capital] marked an event in the full philosophical sense of the term: at the same time a rupture and irreversible beginning. A collaborative, seminary effort between multiple authors - convened by Louis Althusser - the text proposed a radical new reading of Das Kapital, one that was intentionally partial and unorthodox, and all the more productive for being so. Its almost immediate success within both domestic and international circles inaugurated a new tradition of philosophical thought under the banner of structural Marxism, thematising notions such as symptomatic reading, militant science, structural causality and theoretical anti-humanism. The precocious seminary contributors invariably went on to become hugely influential forces themselves, from Pierre Macherey, Jacques Ranciere, and Roger Esablet, to the beloved, one-time Professor at the CRMEP, Etienne Balibar. On the occasion of its 60-year anniversary, this conference seeks to revisit the intellectual legacy of Reading Capital, investigating its contemporary relevance, as well as the polemics that have emerged since its publication. We thereby invite papers that critically reflect on this legacy, drawing attention to the limits of the work as well as its unexplored potentials. We would also like to welcome papers that engage with Capital itself, and the various other readings that have become canonised in the intervening decades.